1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a reusable, ergonomically enhanced, plastic bottle case for transporting bottles of beverage. Specifically, the present invention discloses a bottle carrier case having clean lines with a serrated, or crenelated side profile, encompassing several different designs and dimensions, each of which are adapted for transporting different bottle sizes. Each bottle carrier design has ergonomic features which enable the user to more easily and efficiently load, stack, and unload cases full of bottles than has been heretofore realized.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has become increasingly common for beverages such as soft drinks to be sold in bottles made of plastic. Bottles made of plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) have become especially popular with the soft drink industry because of their transparency, light weight, and low cost. The light weight characteristic of these bottles has enabled the soft drink manufacturers to have ever increasing bottle capacities. Such capacities commonly include 16 oz., 20 oz., and 1, 2, and 3 liters, and may include other varying sizes. These, in turn, result in ever increasing case weight.
Cases of bottles of soft drinks are customarily stacked one on top of the other for warehouse storage and subsequent shipment. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,344,530 of de Larosiere discloses a molded plastic case which may be loaded with PET bottles and stably stacked. The case has bottle pockets which are shaped to closely fit the bases of the bottles which are inserted in the pockets. The pockets are shaped to orient the bottles along the centerlines of the pockets. Thus, bottles seated in the pockets of the case disclosed in the '530 patent may be stably stacked. A problem arises, however, when the stacked cases need to be individually manually unloaded. It is difficult to easily slide a loaded case off of the supporting bottles from an underlying case.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,700,836 of Hammett was designed, among other purposes, to address this type of unloading problem which arises, incidentally most often when a delivery person is unloading cases from a delivery truck to a retail store. Although the case disclosed in the '836 patent affords stable stacking, it is difficult to manually remove a loaded case from a stack of cases. This appears to be a problem in all known bottle carrier cases. The more stably a fully loaded bottle carrier case can be stacked, the more difficult it is for someone to remove a loaded case.
A further requirement of bottle carrier cases is to be able to cross-stack the cases both when they are fully loaded with bottles and when they are empty. This cross-stacking feature greatly increases the stability of any stack, whether it be empty of full. More particularly, it is an additional requirement that when empty cases are cross stacked or column stacked that they nest as deeply as possible into the underlying cases. This affords both increased stability and the ability to transport as many cases as possible in the same volume.
There is therefore a great need in the art for a case which can be stably stacked when fully loaded which can be stably stacked when empty and which can be easily unloaded from that stack when full.